208 CHAPTER 8


• Finally, in Europe products in the marketplace with some GMO content must carry identifying labels, whereas in the United States the Food and Drug Administration does not require labels on any approved GM foods.


Which of these two approaches is better? In the abstract, the best regula- tory approach is one that allows new technologies to be used while prevent- ing new risks to human health or the environment. Using this standard, the US approach has so far done a better job than the European approach, because it has allowed many more useful new technologies to be employed by farm- ers, fortunately without any documented new risks. In contrast, the European approach has blocked the planting of GM crops in most countries in Europe, and in many cases the consumption of GM foods and feeds, to the frustration of most European farmers, who want to share in the productivity gains these crops provide. Most of the GMOs that have been put on the market over the past dozen years have been approved using the risk-based American regulatory approach rather than the uncertainty-based European regulatory approach, and yet the safety record for the technology has remained essentially un- blemished. This could be seen as a strong recommendation for the American approach. If the European approach had been followed everywhere, many fewer productive technologies would have been available to farmers, and the safety record would not have been any better. There has not yet been any documented evidence that approved GMOs


have posed new risks either to human health or to the environment. This find- ing of “no new risks” is now the official view of scientific authorities in Europe itself. European science academies took a number of years to study the impacts of GM crops on human health and the environment following the first com- mercializations in 1995, but by 2001–04 a consensus had emerged, even in Europe, that no new risks from these seeds had been documented. In 2001 the Research Directorate General of the EU released a summary


of 81 separate scientific studies conducted over a 15-year period (all financed by the EU rather than private industry) aimed at determining whether GM products were unsafe, insufficiently tested, or underregulated (Kessler and Economidis 2001). The EU Research Directorate concluded from this study that “research on GM plants and derived products so far developed and mar- keted, following usual risk assessment procedures, has not shown any new risks on human health or the environment” (EU Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, press briefing, 2001). National academies of science in Europe began drawing this same conclu- sion one year later. In December 2002, the French Academy of Sciences (2002,


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